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Overview

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up to Brick Lane that will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original voices.

Gabriel L ightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern E ngland mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial H otel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. D espite the pressures, all his hard work looks set to pay off.

Until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death  but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.

Elsewhere, Gabriel faces other complications. His father is dying of cancer, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, and the restaurant manager appears to be running an illegal business under Gabe's nose.

Enter L ena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. U nder her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows  and the future he thought he wanted.

Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali's fiction. S he is compared to D ickens and called one of three British novelists who are "the voice of a generation" by Time magazine. In the Kitchenis utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer.

Product Details

About the Author

Monica Ali has been named by Granta as one of the twenty best young British novelists. She is the author of In the Kitchen, Alentejo Blue, and Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

October 20, 1967

Place of Birth:

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Education:

B.A. with Honors, Oxford, 1989

Editorial Reviews

Signature

Reviewed byPatricia Volk

Arestaurant kitchen is a functional substitute for hell. Flames leap, plates fly-knives and fingers, too. They're also the default place immigrants, legal and otherwise, find work. At London's Imperial Hotel, the setting for Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, nobody speaks the same language and everybody is underpaid. Ali, acclaimed author of Brick Lane, nails the killer heat, killer fights and lethal grease buildup, all of it supervised by a "simmering culinary Heathcliff," Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef.

Lightfoot dropped out of school at 16 to begin paying his kitchen dues, working crazy hours with crazy people while studying food chemistry and Brillat-Savarin. Along the way, he picked up scarred hands and a ravaged psyche. At 24, given his own restaurant, it went straight up his nose. Now, almost 20 years later, two wealthy Londoners have agreed to back Gabriel in a new restaurant, Lightfoot's, where he'll serve "Classic French, precisely executed. Rognons de veau dijonnaise, poussin en cocotte Bonne Femme, tripes à la mode de Caen." In postmodern balsamic-drenched London, Gabriel is confident traditional French is poised for a comeback.

Then the naked corpse of a Ukrainian night porter is discovered in the Imperial's basement, his head in a pool of blood. There is no one to claim the body. The ripple-free effect of a human death unhinges Gabriel. He develops a voluptuous need to self-sabotage. Visual manifestations include a Dr. Strangelove arm tic, shaking limbs and violent bald-spot scratching. Gabriel cheats on his fiancée and lies to his lover. The story istold in the third person, but through Gabriel's point of view. Intimacy juggles distance: "After a certain point, he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck."

Ali is brilliant at showing loss and adaptation in a polyglot culture. Her descriptions of the changing peoplescape are fresh. But inside Gabriel's head is not the most compelling place to be. A tragic nonhero, he thinks with his "one-eyed implacable foe." It does not help that a recurring dream crumbles him, and since Gabriel doesn't understand the dream, neither does the reader. It assumes an unsustainable importance. You can play Freud or you can turn the page.

Ali is not plot-averse: she provides a mysterious death, a hotel sex-trade scam, a slave-labor scheme, missing money and a dying parent. Yet Lightfoot is a character in search of a motive. It's a tribute to Ali that we care. Here is a true bastard, ravaged and out of control. In the Kitchen has the thud and knock of life-inexplicable, impenetrable, not sewn up at all. As Gabriel's lover is fond of saying: "Tchh." (June)

Patricia Volk is the author, most recently, of the memoirStuffed and the novelTo My Dearest Friends(both from Knopf).

From the immigrant world of East End London in Brick Lane, shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Ali moves into the culinary world of a once posh London hotel restaurant, again capturing the multicultural layers of modern London. Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef for the Imperial Hotel, dreams of owning his own restaurant but must first contend with the UN task force that is his kitchen crew. His life becomes even more complicated when the body of a Hungarian porter is found dead in a storeroom. Still, restaurant troubles are nothing when compared with his personal life. His girlfriend is pressuring him about marriage, unaware that he's sleeping with a Russian kitchen girl, and his ever-difficult father is dying of cancer. Gabe's two stories entwine, the pressure mounts, and, finally, he loses his bearings. With sometimes sly humor, Ali deftly sheds light on the irony of struggling in a land with abundant opportunities. For all fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/09.]Donna Bettencourt

Library Journal

The turbulent, multicultural London backdrop is the same, but the dutiful Muslim wife in transition, who drove the action of Ali's brilliant debut (Brick Lane, 2003, etc.), has been replaced by a very different kind of protagonist: a talented chef in midlife crisis. The future looks rosy for 42-year-old Gabriel Lightfoot. He has turned around a failing restaurant in an old London hotel and secured financial backing to open his own establishment, a lifelong dream. Marriage is in the cards with gorgeous girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer. Yet the novel's first sentence signals the crack-up to come. A Ukrainian kitchen porter has been found dead in the restaurant basement. Another porter, young, rail-thin Lena from Belorusse, appears to be homeless. Gabe invites her to his place, a favor for which she matter-of-factly offers sex in return. Lena is cold and hard-unsurprising, since she was trafficked into prostitution and is on the run from her brutal pimp. Gabe is startled to realize that he does indeed want to have sex with Lena, in fact is falling for her. Charlie finds out and dumps him. A visit to his dying father in the former mill town where he was raised brings back childhood memories. Meanwhile there's a kitchen to be run. Ali does a superb job of evoking this histrionic, occasional violent workplace manned by "a United Nations task force." She hints too at the dark world of bonded labor that lies beyond the kitchen, as a major scandal involving the hotel maids threatens to erupt and Gabe plays detective. It's too much for him; he has two panic attacks before losing it completely and roaming the streets like a madman. Ali takes risks here, and not all of them pay off. Gabe's obsessionwith Lena and subsequent breakdown are not wholly convincing, and Charlie gets shortchanged as a character. Moment to moment, however, the novel is engrossing. Flawed but still impressive, the work of a fearless writer determined to challenge herself. Author tour to Chicago, Denver, New York, San Francisco, Seattle

Kirkus Reviews

"Part Kitchen Confidential, part murder mystery, [Ali] uses a posh hotel as a window into British society."The Daily Beast

“All the ingredients for a sizzling tale are present: A sudden death that may or may not be accidental. A middle-age chef on the verge of a breakdown. Sexual obsession. An illicit affair. A nefarious plot involving human smuggling.”—Thrity Umrigar, Boston Globe

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Set in London, this book is about Chef Gabe Lightfoot, and his very stressful life. Plagued with girlfriend troubles (all his own fault), work troubles, and family issues, his life is spiraling out of control. On top of it all, he makes some startling discoveries about his childhood, and himself.
I was really torn on this book whether to give it three stars or four. I ended up going with the four stars since the writing is so good. The plot itself, while interesting, got a little too contrived for me with the political and philosophical discussions of a few of the characters. At times I felt as if the author was using the book as her own personal agenda, rather than just letting the story unfold.

Two2dogs

More than 1 year ago

I STARTED THIS BOOK TWICE, DID NOT CARE TO CONTINUE READING, JUST NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH. I DID READ BRICK LANE AND LOVED IT, THIS ONE WAS JUST NOT COLORFUL ENOUGH.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Justsooze

More than 1 year ago

Gabriel Lightfoot is a 42-year-old executive chef putting in his time trying to revive the less than stellar restaurant at the Imperial Hotel in London, while waiting for the financing to finally make his dream of opening his own restaurant come true. The book begins with an interesting premise, but the more I learned about Gabriel's life both in and out of the kitchen, the less I cared what happened to him. His life seems "not quite good enough' in all aspects...and then the body of one of his kitchen staff is discovered - an accidental death or not? Just when it should have become more interesting, it got bogged down. Reminiscent of a meal that wasn't good enough to even finish."

BillPilgrim

More than 1 year ago

There were some good parts to this story. I did not care much for the descriptions of cooking science and weaving. The author must have felt compelled to keep that in the book after doing the research. The most interesting were the host of immigrants working in the kitchen, and the peripheral issues of human trafficking and virtual slavery.
It is really hard to fathom the relationship between Gabriel and Lena. Why is he so fascinated with her, and why does he believe that there is a possibility that she could possibly be interested in him romantically. I thought the lack of any description of their sex acts beyond the very early foreplay by Gabriel made it impossible to understand this attraction by Gabriel. If the author would have described their interplay during sex, it would have given this aspect of the book much more substance.
I did not much care for the end of the book, the last 70 pages or so. It seemed like there had been not enough earlier that would have predicted it. It should have been a more gradual process to lead to that behavior from the main character.

BookLover526

More than 1 year ago

I really hated this book. I did not like the characters or the writing or the plot. Neither the main character nor the peripheral ones were interesting. And I wanted to throw myself on a loom with all the weaving description.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

TheReadingWriter

More than 1 year ago

Undoubtedly realistic novel set in the kitchen of an upscale dining establishment in today's London. The characters are classic--no doubt their types can be found in any number of commercial kitchens in any major city of any western country. This felt as real to me as some of the chef memoirs of recent years and as funny. I liked the book even better than her breakout success Brick Lane. Author Ali has enormous talents and deserves great success.

Harris_Two

More than 1 year ago

This is the first book I've read by this author. She is fantastic. The story and the characters are fascinating and believable.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Yesh_Prabhu

More than 1 year ago

In "Brick Lane", Monica Ali showed great promise of a talented writer with formidable narrative skill. The novel was short-listed for the Booker prize. In her new novel "In the Kitchen", her second novel and third book ("Alentejo Blue", a collection of stories, was her second book), Monica Ali has proven that she is quite capable of writing a follow up worthy of praise.
The novel starts rather slowly, but the pace gains speed and the narration gains momentum, as the novel progresses. The second half of the novel is extraordinary, with many bewitching passages, and here the reader gets glimpses of an astonishing and magical writer.
This book could be considered as three stories weaved into a lively novel, or three strands of a story braided as if to create a lovely plait. Gabriel Lightfoot, the protagonist, is executive chef at London's Imperial Hotel. The first story is Gabriel's relationship with his long time girlfriend, Charlie, an attractive, red-haired singer at a club. The second story is Gabriel's affair and fascination with a beautiful and rather mysterious woman from Belarus, an escaped sex slave named Lena. The third story is Gabriel's relationship with his father, who has been diagnosed with cancer. And all three stories revolve around the central incident of the novel: a porter - an illegal immigrant from Ukraine, is found murdered in the basement of the Imperial Hotel.
Through realistic descriptions of a busy kitchen of a fancy restaurant, and uncontrived, smooth flowing dialogues, vivid descriptions, gripping passages, and the magic of her pen, Monica Ali has created an absorbing and entertaining novel. And I think "In the Kitchen" will enhance her reputation as one of the important English writers, and a master of English prose.
Yesh Prabhu, Plainsboro, NJ

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